XAML View Engine

I just had an interesting idea and wanted to blog it down before forgetting since I can’t really spend time investigating it now.

Well I’ve been working with NVelocity and now Spark to use as my view engine for template generation. I’m very happy with Spark right now (since it actually works) and I have been generating templates like a fool the last couple days. I think I might have a preview release of NBusiness 3 out for testing sometime soon.

That being said there is definitely still something missing. It works… it’s a heck of a lot better than NVelocity but it’s not quite perfect. I was just mentioning this to a friend and suddenly had a jolt of inspiration. I had the idea that you could, quite possibly, declare your entire template in XAML . Your XAML syntax could support binding and you could have looping and conditional controls right in it. This would allow you to declaratively define code in arbitrary languages. Pretty interesting… here is a little snippet of what I was envisioning:

<Class Attributes=”Public, Abstract” Base=”BusinessBase” Name=”{Binding Name}”>    <Repeat Collection=”{Binding Fields}”>       <Field Name=”field” Attributes=”Private” Type=”{Binding Path=Type}” Name=”{Binding Path=Name, Converter=FIeldNameConverter}” />       <Property Attributes=”Public” Type={Binding Path=Type}” Name={Binding Path=Name}”>          <Property.Getter><Return Expression=”{Binding RelativeSource=field}” /></Property.Getter>       </Property>    </Repeat>    … </Class>

Honestly, I’m thinking that all I have to do is create these objects which would inherit from DependencyObject and the XAML serializer will do the rest… I doubt it would be that simple but I may have to try it out later tonight.

The thing is, once you have this template into a DOM you could then run it through some sort of Conversion process to create CodeDom objects which would produce code for any arbitrary language! The trick would be to make it flexible enough to support conversion to things like HTML or whatever. Wow, this could be interesting.